“What I was thinking, Father.”
“This typewriter and the one in the other office, they’re not what I’d have to buy if I were spending parish funds. This is a very nice machine.” Joe turned to admire it.
“We have that model in our office, Father.” But obviously Mr Lane wasn’t interested in typewriters and chose that moment, though he’d been told over the phone that it wouldn’t do him any good, to try again. “Father, you’d think now would be soon enough to enroll kids for school in fall.”
“You would, yes, but you’d be wrong, Mr Lane. The boy, as I said, we can take — as of now. Tomorrow, or the next day, maybe not.”
“I can’t see putting the girl in a public school, Father.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Mr Lane.” Joe wasn’t a fanatic about education. All he’d wanted was a school where the emphasis was on studies and sports (mens sana, you might say, in corpore sano), where those who failed were not passed, where the boys wore dark green blazers and the girls dark green jumpers (“Down with the daily style show!”). But such a school stood out nowadays. Even Protestants and Jews tried to get their kids into Joe’s school.
“Father, how about moving in another desk?”
“No, no. It wouldn’t be fair to the other children in that grade, or to the Sister.”
“What if I talked to the Sister?”
Joe didn’t care for this at all. “No dice.”
“You can’t do anything?”
“What can I do, Mr Lane? Short of enlarging the school.”
“Can I do anything, Father? Would it help if I gave you another check?”
So. But Joe wasn’t certain he’d been insulted, and didn’t want to be — he gave the man a possible out. “Toward enlarging the school? I’m afraid there are no such plans, if that’s what you mean.”
“No, it’d be yours.”
So. “I’ll put you down for a year, Mr Lane. You won’t have to see me in January.” Joe rose from his desk, moved swiftly to the door, opened it, and stood by it, waiting for the couple to go. When they passed him, he ignored the man (and was himself ignored) but nodded to the woman, feeling sorry for her — probably she’d been afraid all along that something like this would happen, and hence her silence, he thought. He went back to his desk and sat down to think.
People, he was thinking, have a right to be judged by their own standards until these can be raised, when he noticed that there were two calendars on his desk and no check.
Well, he wanted no part of it. Yes, the Lanes might attend Mass elsewhere. But they would discover when the time came, say, to have a baby baptized, that it couldn’t be done elsewhere. The Church, to that extent anyway, was still the Church.
A bad situation, though — one of those situations from which the wise pastor ostensibly retires but handles in due course through his assistant.
Later that evening, after Father Felix had retired to the new bed in the guest room, Joe and the curate (whose name Joe still didn’t know) sat on in the pastor’s study. Joe, doing most of the talking, had had less than usual, the curate more, it seemed — he was yawning. “Used to be,” Joe was saying, “we all drove black cars. I still do.” Joe couldn’t understand why a priest, even a young priest today, if able to afford a new car, would choose one the color of the curate’s. “I guess it’s not important. St Francis,” Joe said, answering the phone.
“If you’re St Francis, I’m Lyndon B. Johnson.”
“Hold on, Lyndon. Don’t hang up.”
But Lyndon did.
“About phone calls, Father. Be sure you get the name and address before you give out any information, even Mass times. And don’t settle bets. And don’t discuss theology. Or you’ll have drunks and worse calling at all hours. I’ve got a few more things to tell you, but they’ll keep.”
“In that case…” The curate swallowed a yawn. “Think I’ll go to bed, Father.”
Joe — he hated to go to bed — changed the subject. “How’s the room? O.K.?”
“O.K.”
Joe had been expecting a bit more and wondered if he had hurt the curate’s feelings. “It’s not important, what I was saying about cars.”
The curate smiled at Joe. “My uncle’s the dealer in Whipple. He gave me a deal on the car, but that was part of it — the color.”
“I see.” Joe tried not to appear as interested as he was. “What’s your uncle call his place — Whipple Volkswagen? I know a lot of ’em do. That’s what they call it here — Inglenook Volkswagen.”
“He calls it by his own name.”
“I see.” Joe tried not to appear as interested as he was. “And this is your father’s brother?”
“My mother’s.”
“I see.”
“Think I’ll turn in now, Father.”
“Maybe we both should. Sunday’s always a tough day.”
12. SUNDAY
THAT MORNING, WITH Joe watching from the sacristy, the curate said his first Mass in the parish. He was slow, of course, but he wasn’t fancy, and he didn’t fall down, though he did stumble once. (This had made Joe think of the old preecumenical, or triumphalist, joke about the curate who’d lost his footing at his first Mass, causing the pastor to whisper from the sacristy, “Get up! Get up! They’ll be doing that down the street,” and had also made Joe think the joke is on us now.) His sermon was standard, marred only by his gestures, and he read the announcements well. In one important respect he had been a disappointment.
“I should’ve told you,” Joe said to him in the sacristy after Mass, “to introduce yourself to the congregation.”
“Sorry. I’ll do it next week. Father, what’d you think of the sermon?”
What have we here, a budding preacher? Let’s hope not. “The sermon? Good enough. One thing I would say, Father. Your words and gestures were a little out of sync at times — looked like a bad job of dubbing.”
The curate nodded. “Somebody said something like that at the sem.”
Joe was pleased to have his criticism confirmed and taken so well. “Gestures — you have to feel ’em, or be a very gifted speaker. I gave ’em up.”
“Maybe I should.”
Joe nodded, pleased at the prospect.
“By the way,” the curate said, “I’ll be eating out today.”
“Oh?” A little sudden, wasn’t it?
“With one of my classmates.”
“I see.” But Joe didn’t.
“Thought I’d better tell you.”
“Good idea, but the word is ask.”
“What I meant, Father.”
“O.K.”
That afternoon the Twins were rained out in Boston. So Joe and Father Felix were stuck with each other — and had at it in the study with the Sunday paper. Joe, by his good example, his tidiness, with the paper, had tried to make Father Felix mindful of the next reader, but had failed. The monk, whose glasses still needed changing, still held the paper open in front of him, as far away from him as he could, so that it was like the prow of a ship, until his arms gave out and the whole thing came crashing down in his lap — this was hard on the paper. Instead of smoothing it out while waiting for the strength to be restored to his arms, he cocked his head back and read what he could of the text in its collapsed and crumpled condition, the salient items or sentences thereof, noisily wrenching up more, shifting and tightening his grip like a dog with a bone — this was hard on the paper. If he’d read the funnies first (the only part of the paper he’d miss if it were missing), then Joe could have the other parts while they were fresh and intact. But no, the monk had to mess up the rest of the paper, it seemed, before he read the funnies.